Master of Light is a gentle and graceful film defined by the capriciousness of sight.

It isn’t interested in finding a bright side to war; such an outcome would feel too complacent. Instead, it points its microphone unflinchingly at the darkest parts of the human soul, while forcing the viewer to hold the camera and search for the brutality within its images and empty spaces. It makes the audience, and their recognition, a necessary ingredient to portraying the bigger picture.

The kind of film you feel you need to shower after seeing, it just might have been Fuller’s finest hour.

“The Last Wish” has no qualms about testing the expectations of its young audience while delivering a freewheeling tale about appreciating the nine lives we already have.

A movie brimming with sentiment but not sentimentality, this is one of the most moving animated films in recent memory, and, beyond that, groundbreaking too.

A work of tremendous lyrical potency, even more intricate in meaning and scope than the pair’s earlier stunner, Sujo thunderously demonstrates why Valdez and Rondero stand among those soon to be regarded as the new masters of Mexican cinema.

Most segments have a fair share of cheap scares, but they also delve into the art of the build-up, as if delivering a series of grim jokes with bloody punchlines. Consider it a 21st-century take on "Tales from the Crypt."

Reichardt crafts a highly textured narrative that both invokes the mythology of the American frontier and cleverly transcends it.

The “John Wick” saga has changed and evolved throughout the years, For this film, there is no denying how it has made Chad Stahelski one of our best action filmmakers, and how the franchise gave Keanu yet another career-redefining role. It’s been a wild ride, and one of the best and most consistent movie series ever. No matter where the roads lead, however, “I’m thinking John Wick is back.”

There is a magnificence to The Grapes of Wrath in the breadth of its ambition, which still makes it the definitive cinematic take on one of America’s most defining epochs.

Maoz maintains such a riveting formalism that everything seems to fit together.

While all of the people they meet are delightful characters who the film manages to milk for every ounce of their personality, Varda and JR inevitably emerge as the real stars here.

The unexpected love child of Wong Kar-wai and Andrei Tarkovsky, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” transforms from a lush, slow-burn pastiche to an audacious filmmaking gamble while maintaining the pictorial sophistication of its earlier section. It’s both languorous and eye-popping at once.

American Utopia isn’t just a concert doc, but also a life-affirming, euphoria-producing, soul-energizing sing-along protest film that’s asking us to rise up against our own complacency.

“Best Worst Thing” is more than a story about a Broadway show; its most poignant moments examine the thrill of dreams coming true, and the inevitable come down afterwards.

Pinocchio feels like the best mix of classic del Toro and new del Toro, with the wisdom and melancholy that comes with age and experience, yet his bright-eyed love of fairy tales from his Spanish-language films. Perhaps more impressive is how Pinocchio pushes the oldest form of animation to new places, and like the puppet himself, breathes life into inanimate objects.

Karen’s dogged pragmatism, and her complex relationship to the smut that provided her family’s livelihood for thirty years, is why Circus of Books is such a rare delight — and a nearly perfect documentary.

Potrykus’ movies are fixated on the self-destruction inherent to all capitalist systems, and there may be no better avatar for this concern than a brain-dead dude playing video games until the end of time.

Mixing the hooks of Antonioni’s Blow-Up (murder mystery caught via photograph) and Coppola’s The Conversation (murder plot uncovered via sound recording), De Palma made his best film about the power and the limits of film and voyeurism, as well as his most emotionally devastating work.

A stunning debut that develops with the gradual poignancy of a Polaroid, Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun isn’t just an honest movie about the way that we remember the people we’ve lost — fragmented, elusive, nowhere and everywhere all at once — it’s also a heart-stopping act of remembering unto itself.

Haunting and celebratory at once, Heart of a Dog ultimately amounts to a contemplation of mortality.

It is, through every composition, every serrated cut, and every lived-in performance, a rebellious and revolutionary masterpiece that swims so deep into the historical and public consciousness of race, you can’t help but be equally consumed by its unwavering depths.

With its soulful tin heart, Robot Dreams moves us to appreciate the fortune of having a precious pal. Whether for a season or a lifetime.

Witnessing is the most effective defense people have against occupation, and the Israeli military, like all thieves, wilts in the face of being watched. The footage is out there, and it’s rarely been assembled into a more concise, powerful, and damning array than it is here. Now it only has to be seen.

Sorelle has said that she created “Mountains” as a movie where “between plots lie moments.” How refreshing. Especially since those moments really feel like they exist, more than just “being captured.”

Here is an orgiastic work of slaphappy genius that doesn’t operate like a narrative film so much as a particle accelerator — or maybe a cosmic washing machine — that two psychotic 12-year-olds designed in the hopes of reconciling the anxiety of what our lives could be with the beauty of what they are.

The story now sounds like fodder for a rote “old codger learns to like people” narrative, but Wild Strawberries is more about a man’s gradual coming to terms with who he was, who he is, and what he’s leaving behind.

TÁR is a provocation full of slow-motion suckerpunches and the driest of laughs (even its accented title is a knowingly pretentious in-joke) and yet Field seems as uninterested in trolling his liberal audience as he is in patronizing them.

Shot in gorgeously expressionistic black-and-white and fusing multiple genres into a thoroughly original whole, Amirpour has crafted a beguiling, cryptic and often surprisingly funny look at personal desire that creeps up on you with the nimble powers of its supernatural focus.

Few movies have so palpably conveyed the sheer isolation of fear, and the extent to which history is often made by people who are just trying to survive it — few movies have so vividly illustrated that one man can only do as much for his country as a country can do for one of its men.

Air is a slam dunk and ultimately one of the best sports movies ever made.

“The Fast and the Furious” with wheelbarrows, Paraguayan action-thriller-romance hybrid 7 Boxes is a rollicking good time at the movies that offers breathtaking action and suspense, humor and appealing characters all in one visually flashy package.

Littered with clever dialogue, a beautifully constructed narrative, as well as moments that shift between the energizing and sheer terror, there are a slew of endearing qualities worth sifting through.

An awe-inspiring film.

The darker undertones of the family are handled with surprising nuance considering the first-timer behind the camera. The movie deals in open secrets, implications, and unsettling histories; a sense of alienation haunts virtually every scene.

Epic in scope yet unassuming throughout, Linklater's incredibly involving chronicle marks an unprecedented achievement in fictional storytelling.

Razor-sharp and shatteringly romantic ... as perfect a film as any to have premiered this year.

There’s a deep sense of melancholy and finality that runs through The Last Detail even when it’s at its funniest, not just because of Meadows’ fate, but because of Buddusky and Mulhall’s collective guilt for being part of a system that would dole out such a punishment.

On the whole, Manakamana succeeds by creating the ongoing anticipation of something, anything to happen next, a wholly unique sensation specific to its inventive design.

The Hidden Fortress is a bracing adventure in its own right — not a frivolous outlier from one of cinema’s most formative oeuvres, but rather a Cervantes-inflected delight that complicates and enriches Kurosawa’s signature humanism by exploring the value of morality in an amoral world.

It’s no surprise that Hertzfeldt distills the tragicomic absurdity of being alive in 2020 better than any other filmmaker has thus far (after all, he’s been doing it for the last two decades).

For a biblically-scaled film cycle so rich with irony that it seems to be chipping off the walls of the brutalist apartment complex where most of it takes place, perhaps the greatest irony of them all is that Dekalog is ultimately defined by its humility.

Pacifiction is not a vicarious experience of luxury; it is an experience of life. Set to its own tidal rhythm, it is one of the most beautiful and rigorously introspective movies of this or any year, a film that makes you deeply ponder the fate of humanity itself.

An elegantly stylized masterpiece of cool by maverick director Jean-Pierre Melville, 'Le samouraï' is a razor-sharp cocktail of 1940s American gangster cinema and 1960s French pop culture-with a liberal dose of Japanese lone-warrior mythology. [16 Aug 2017]

Strauch creates enormous drama from the clips at her disposal — not just the Boenish material, but movie clips and found footage, all of which is deftly handled.

An excruciating chase film, a terrifying puzzle-box whodunit, and a testament to romanticizing even the darkest cinema in glowing 35mm, Strange Darling is an outright triumph.

Melancholia hovers in ambiguity with riveting aesthetic prowess.

The excitement in The Soft Skin, however, gives way to an intense tragedy that's INFORMED by the thrills.

Speak No Evil is the most cunningly depraved horror film in years, offering a piercing commentary on the ways we accommodate others to the point of self-subjugation.

Guadagnino wants not only to expand your consciousness as a moviegoer, but to cut you open and rearrange all the parts of you that see and feel things when you watch a film at all.

To love in the moment holds far more power than wishing for something you can never have, yet when it comes to Avilés’ work, we can’t help but do both, simultaneously adoring Tótem while eagerly looking ahead to what’s coming next.

As Bong himself has taught us, paradise is an elusive notion. Thankfully, there’s still plenty of passion to enjoy in the nostalgic joy that “Yellow Door” brings, both to him and to us.

One Battle After Another might be among the sillier films that Anderson has ever made, but there’s no mistaking the sincerity of its horrors, or how lucidly it diagnoses the smallness of the men inflecting them upon the innocent and the vulnerable.

Taking its time to let the world take shape, Short Term 12 builds to an involving series of mini-climaxes without tidying up every loose end.

"Citizen Ashe” is a fascinating portrait that weaves together his on- and off-court life seamlessly.

As with every beautiful, unearthly segment of "Pigeon," the only certainty is life's endlessly puzzling nature.

A satire that chastises Hollywood for its blinkered moralizing yet espouses on the value of escapism, Preston Sturges’ “Sullivan’s Travels” may seem like a film rife with contradictions, but not only is it cohesive, it never once feels muddled or, worse, didactic.

The result is a searing look into a little-known moment in history with profound repercussions for how we understand policing today.

An increasingly loud world may have made the quiet truths of "Mrs. Miniver" seem small - tune out the noise and hear what this film is saying. It's a roadmap for how dignity and freedom can survive.

As with most miracles, Sunset Song is more likely to evoke awe than any one particular emotion; it accumulates an immensely tender beauty that fills up your heart like water rising in a well during a rainstorm.

Moonlight transforms rage and frustration into unadulterated intimacy. In this mesmerizing portrait of a suffocating world, the only potential catharsis lies in acknowledging it as Chiron so deeply wishes he could. Despite the somber tone, Moonlight is a beacon of hope for the prospects of speaking up.

It could, from premise alone, sound like an Austen-ish comedy of manners, and perhaps the film that Ozu might have made early in his career. Here, though, it’s an immaculate, gentle drama in which society gets in the way of the happiness of a father and daughter, and growing up and moving away isn’t so much a victory as a bitter cost of time and change.

A brilliant synthesis of story, theme, performance and innovation.

Roma is by far the most experimental storytelling in a career filled with audacious (and frequently excessive) gimmicks. Here, he tables the showiness of “Children of Men” and “Gravity” in favor of ongoing restraint, creating a fresh kind of intimacy. Like a grand showman working overtime to tone things down, he lures viewers into an apparently straightforward scene, only to catch them off guard with new information.

Pawlikowski doesn't punish his viewers, he simply challenges them. Take the vow to dedicate your attention to Ida and you’ll be rewarded deeply.

The Mole Agent may not look like a documentary, but it builds to a poetic finale enmeshed in emotional authenticity.

If The Raid: Redemption was a thrashing drum solo, its sequel is the opulent symphony where every instrument is played with fevered inspiration.

Walsh sends about a half-dozen plot lines, styles, and themes into the air and keeps them all whizzing along like a master plate spinner, but he makes it look effortless — you never feel the director straining for his effects, all seamlessly integrated into 96 smooth minutes.

Given its themes and the tragic circumstances of Dickinson's life, "Passion" is a refreshingly humorous work. Its firecracker dialogue is invigorating; the assured, measured compositions are equally compelling. And in its sensitivity to intersecting conflicts related to womanhood and class, it is quietly masterful.

An immense, brave, and genuinely earth-shaking self-portrait that explores sexual assault with a degree of nuance and humility often missing from the current discourse, The Tale is undeniably primed for the #MeToo movement, but it’s also so much bigger than that.

While this dream-like warble of a swan song may be too pitchy and scattered to hit with the gale-force power that made “The Wind Rises” feel like such a definitive farewell, The Boy and the Heron finds Miyazaki so nakedly bidding adieu — to us, and to the crumbling kingdom of dreams and madness that he’ll soon leave behind — that it somehow resolves into an even more fitting goodbye, one graced with the divine awe and heart-stopping wistfulness of watching a true immortal make peace with their own death.

Flee becomes his cinematic catharsis, as Amin recounts his journey in fits and starts, while the animation turns his memories into a bracing adventure that doubles as modern history.

For all of its profundity, it’s just as funny as the gag-heavy likes of Sleeper and Bananas, and while it has some competition for the title of Best Woody Allen Film, few would contest its status as his most beloved.

It’s a powerful look at the durability of parent-child bonds as well as a fascinating psychological thriller about what it takes to heal such a rift when it seems irreparable.

The Irishman is alive with Scorsese’s trademark style.

By shattering genre conventions, Silva subverts traditional perspectives on modern adulthood and finds no easy answers in the process.

The movie's stakes are alternately personal and political, but Petzold's skill truly comes into focus in the tense climax, when those two aims come together with a powerful act of defiance.

A nuanced tale of mutual attraction that reflects a filmmaker and cast operating at the height of their powers, rendering complex circumstances in strikingly personal terms.

If all of Anderson’s movies are sustained by the tension between order and chaos, uncertainty and doubt, “Asteroid City” is the first that takes that tension as its subject, often expressing it through the friction created by rubbing together its various levels of non-reality.

An unhinged work that captures the escalating madness of untangling entire social webs through the lens of a single person or event, Babysitter charges through the ruins of mainstream cinema’s post-#MeToo moment.

The Secret Disco Revolution is the doc that disco deserves – rigorous, critical and entertaining.

It turns material that could have resulted in a sporadic narrative into a profound statement that the Arab Spring is a continuation of humanity's constant efforts to make a better, more just world.

Things to Come may lack the urgency or cool that flecks the writer-director’s previous movies, but this is perhaps her richest piece to date, a warm, funny and profoundly sensitive portrait of letting go and learning to make new memories.

The filmmakers have instead provided a brilliant window into the impact of the contemporary media circus on public life. While not exactly a figure of sympathy — he lied, after all, more than once — Weiner nevertheless maintains the charisma and drive to provide the movie with one of the most compelling anti-heroes in recent memory.

Rather than relish in the stark proceedings, Manuscripts Don't Burn preys on its viewers' imagination, leaving several deaths and other dreary outcomes off-screen. In the unbearable tension of its final moments, the movie arrives at an expected destination, but the outcome stings more than anything preceding it.

Strickland generates a discomfiting quality that keeps the mystery of his world in play. Above all else, he taps into the intangible elements of sexual attraction by bathing them in ambiguities.

To no one’s surprise, Reinsve is immaculately attuned to Trier’s energy, and Sentimental Value is carried by the manic frustration she brings to her part, which is as fun as it is freighted with crisis.

First Cousin Once Removed benefits from the clarity provided by Honig's published poetry, which surfaces in voiceover narration and words on the screen, rendering the undulations of his life in sweeping abstractions.

Despite the ongoing momentum, Sleepless Night never loses touch with its story.

Pure sense and subjectivity in a way that evokes the same visual magic of Ross’ documentary work, Nickel Boys so viscerally and fundamentally centers the experience of its young Black characters that even the most racist brand of revisionist history could never hope to deny their truth.

One of the most unique and honest musicals of the 20th Century.

The director’s most outwardly accessible movie in ages, Phantom Thread is at once an evocative period drama and a magical fable about lonely, solipsistic people finding solace in their mutual sense of alienation.

That it manages to end a note that’s both deeply sad and sardonic only further makes its case as one of the finest forgotten films of its time, and one of the best, period.

A wholly original and thoroughly surprising fusion of sensory overload and liberal philosophy bound to confuse and provoke in equal measures.

Heinzerling's beautifully shot, painfully intimate look at the aging couple's struggle to survive amid personal and financial strain is both heartbreaking and intricately profound. This is a story about creative desire so strong it hurts.

It's a frantic microcosm of life itself.

The result is a roman candle of a movie that feels like it was shot out of a cannon, despite being burdened with the gravity of an implausible dream; a totemic Jewish-American odyssey about where such dreams come from, where they might lead to, and where they’re liable to come apart at the seams along the way.

Radwanski’s Toronto-set story isn’t quite a linear, didactic affair drama either, but rather, uses its characters as points of rumination on the present, and its fragile nature, embodied by two people with a complicated past and, most likely, no real future.